A video showing a mother using racial slurs at a playground in Rochester, Minnesota has gone viral on social media.
The video shows the aftermath of a mother of a toddler using the N-word in reference to a reportedly 5-year-old Black child at Soldiers Field Memorial Park playground.
The man recording the video asks the woman, who is white, if she used the N-word to refer to the child, and challenges her to say it again, to which she responds: “F*** you, n***** – n*****, n*****, n*****!”
She then goes on to claim the child was “digging through my s***” and took something belonging to her child. When the man says “and for that you call him a [N-word]?” she says “Yes. If he acts like one then he’s going to be called one.”
Social media users say that the Black child targeted for the abuse is on the autism spectrum. Neither the woman or the child have been identified as of Thursday afternoon, and it’s not clear when the reported incident happened.
Wale Elegbede, the president of the Rochester branch of civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) said the incident is “deeply disturbing and unacceptable.”
“[The NAACP] will be investigating [and] will be responding to this. We will hold this person accountable for this despicable racist act against a child,” he said.
Rochester was the subject of a racism controversy last summer when four students allegedly wrote a racial slur on a footbridge near Century High School. Two months later, the home of State Rep. Kim Hicks was vandalized with swastikas and other racist imagery.
On Thursday, four DFL lawmakers representing the Rochester area – Sen. Liz Boldon and Reps. Andy Smith, Tina Liebling, and the aforementioned Kim Hicks, issued a statement in response to the video.
“We commend the gentleman who recorded the encounter for standing up and protecting one of our youngest community members, a five-year-old boy, from this targeted hate. We condemn these vile acts of racism in the strongest way possible. This disgusting rhetoric has no place in our community, and we’re grateful that a bystander took action and prevented further escalation by the perpetrator,” they said.